Josephine Tey Quotes

30 Sourced Quotes

All his life Toselli's smile had been stretched across his rage, like a tight-rope spanning a chasm.

Josephine Tey
He knew by heart every last minute crack on its surface. He had made maps of the ceiling and gone exploring on them; rivers, islands, and continents. He had made guessing games of it and discovered hidden objects; faces, birds, and fishes. He made mathematical calculations of it and rediscovered his childhood; theorems, angles, and triangles. There was practically nothing else he could do but look at it. He hated the sight of it.

Josephine Tey
Letterwriting is the natural outlet of the "odds." The busy-bodies, the idle, the perverted, the cranks, the feel-it-my-duties... Also the plain depraved. They all write letters. It's their safe outlet, you see. They can be as interfering, as long-winded, as obscene, as pompous, as one-idea'd, as they like on paper, and no one can kick them for it. So they write. My God, how they write!

Josephine Tey
You can't have a tin can tied to your tail and go through life pretending it isn't there.

Josephine Tey
That was the way with grief: it left you alone for months together until you thought that you were cured, and then without warning it blotted out the sunlight.

Josephine Tey
Riches... don't consist in having things, but in not having to do something you don't want to do.... Riches is being able to thumb your nose.

Josephine Tey
As a psychologist she began to suspect she was a very good teacher of French.

Josephine Tey
'Grumbling' was a highly inadequate word to describe the blazing opposition that lighted Pat like a torch. He throbbed with it, like a car at rest with the engine running.

Josephine Tey
There were people whose only interest in life was writing letters. To the newspapers, to authors, to strangers, to City Councils, to the police. It did not much matter to whom; the satisfaction of writing seemed to be all.

Josephine Tey
Nothing puts things in perspective as quickly as a mountain.

Josephine Tey
Her talent lay exclusively in seeing that other people employed theirs.

Josephine Tey
Nothing in this world came out of satisfaction. Except the human race.

Josephine Tey
After three days without one, the desire to read a newspaper vanished. And really, one was happier without.

Josephine Tey
One would expect boredom to be a great yawning emotion, but it isn't, of course. It's a small niggling thing.

Josephine Tey
Charles loathed horses; which he held to be animals of an invincible stupidity, uncontrolled imagination, and faulty deduction.

Josephine Tey
Lucy decided to forget her weight just this once and enjoy herself. This was a decision she made with deplorable frequency.

Josephine Tey
It was pleasant to talk shop again; to use that elliptical, allusive speech that one uses only with another of one's trade.

Josephine Tey
The beasts that talk,
The streams that stand,
The stones that walk,
The singing sand,
That guard the way
To Paradise.

Josephine Tey
Fasting was good for the imagination but bad for logic.

Josephine Tey
In hospitals there was no time off for good behavior.

Josephine Tey
Horse sense is the instinct that keeps horses from betting on men.

Josephine Tey
The truth of anything at all doesn't lie in someone's account of it. It lies in all the small facts of the time. An advertisement in a paper, the sale of a house, the price of a ring.

Josephine Tey
When a man had been a counsel in the criminal courts as long as Kevin had, his mind had only points of view, not convictions any more.

Josephine Tey
I expect this is what death is like when you meet it. Sort of wildly unfair but inevitable.

Josephine Tey
Lack of education is an extraordinary handicap when one is being offensive.

Josephine Tey
The worst of pushing horrible things down into one's subconscious is that when they pop up again they are as fresh as if they had been in a refrigerator. You haven't allowed time to get at them to — to mould them over a little.

Josephine Tey
The builder had lacked an architect's eye. He had used the idiom of the time, but it had apparently not been native to him.

Josephine Tey
The sorrows of humanity are no one's sorrows.... A thousand people drowned in floods in China are news: a solitary child drowned in a pond is tragedy.

Josephine Tey
The lawyer hummed and hawed, not because he had any real objections but because it is a lawyer's business to consider remote contingencies, and a straightforward agreement to anything would be wildly unprofessional.

Josephine Tey
His wife had once shown him a bit in the Mail that said whistling was the sign of an empty mind. But it hadn't cured him.

Josephine Tey